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School-to-prison pipeline

It was in 2001 that the concern for violence in Columbine and other locations in America caused the Surgeon General to relocate the problem of youth violence from criminal justice to the umbrella of the Mental Illness Approach.

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It was in 2001 that the concern for violence in Columbine and other locations in America caused the Surgeon General to relocate the problem of youth violence from criminal justice to the umbrella of the Mental Illness Approach. After a lot of research, it was found that the handful of programs that worked all said the same thing. On Aug. 12, 2004, The News Journal published a column, “Most of those youth anti-violence programs have one fatal flaw.”

The successful programs have two things in common, a commitment to school and education, and they instill an aversion to aberrant behavior, particularly violence.

I continued to teach these same concepts, which I taught my first year teaching in 1965, in a number of communities, including my present Eden-Hamilton Civic Association, where we obtained one of the lowest crime and murder rates in history. With all of this good evidence, boards and commissions seemed to always avoid those people with the expertise to provide for the educational and psychological needs of the Wilmington and Delaware community.

Just as in the case of doing all we can to avoid those triggers that set off our returning veterans so, too, must we avoid all problems with setting off the triggers in our children who have observed great violence.

Experts often remind us that setting limits is necessary to maintain classroom safety and yet, all types of limit setting can act as triggers. A timeout can trigger feelings of abandonment. Ignoring or removing a student from a group can trigger fears of rejection. Discipline can trigger fears of inappropriate punishment.

According to “Massachusetts, Washington State lead U.S. trauma-sensitive school movement,” experts produce a great increase in grades, behavior and lowering of the dropout rate by minimizing the impact of limit setting with a number of techniques that every teacher can learn if they desire to do well in urban communities where the children have experienced trauma.

In the trauma-sensitive classroom, some students’ behavior is a direct response to their mental illness, and a good teacher would be surprised if they behaved in any other manner. The teacher often expects children to act in accord with other students, where the type of mental illness prevalent forces these children to be excused while they get themselves together or go to a room where they can deal with the uncontrollable urges that are overpowering them.

It would be much easier to apply methods taught by leading experts who practice these methods on veterans, their families and good schools than to push these children to drop out and find themselves in the school-to-prison pipeline.

Louis McDuffy is the pastor of the Church of Christ and president of the Eden-Hamilton Park Civic Association.